Women as Cultural Mediators: the Interwar Spanish Literature Across Borders (1914-1940)
Panel
2A
Abstract
Funded by the Galician Government (Secretaría Xeral de Universidades - Consellería de Cultura, Educación e Ordenación Universitaria), the research project “Catalogue of Spanish Literature Translations (1914-1940)”, currently under development, means to offer a bibliographic record and document collection of Spanish literary productions translated into English, French, Italian and Portuguese in the interwar period. Previous experiences (mainly derived from the construction of Valle-Inclán´s Digital Archive, managed by the Grupo de Investigación Valle-Inclán at the USC) account for the novelty value and importance of the “added information” this kind of databases can provide, mainly when regarding the networks of agents and institutions involved in the processes. The usefulness of these data is even more substantial when it comes to re-constructing the role and position occupied by women, in the case of writers and translators acting in what nowadays is known as the “Other Golden Age” of Spanish culture by the beginning of the 20th Century. In this regard, recent studies referred to the Spanish literary field of the time have projected Spanish women translators from the margins of historiography to the center of the feminist debate, offering new insights for the understanding of this period (such as information on specific trajectories of female translators). However, nowadays we are still lacking a complementary and panoramic view regarding the other end of the process: not just the importation of goods, but also their exportation abroad. In short: which literary products are translated from Spanish during the period 1914-1940? Who are their producers? Who are the agents and institutions responsible for that exportation process? And, most of all, what is the role women have played in it as producers of original texts or as mediators (translators, editors, publishers…)? Or, in other words, who act as counterparts of the Spanish female translators of the time? In this sense, this Catalogue is being specificly designed and implemented to account for the names of agents and organisms linked to Spanish literary field in the international frame, specially featuring the function and position of women in this process. Therefore, and bearing in mind the need for accurate and reliable tools for the study of translation as a cultural and economic market, the aims of this presentation are, on one hand, to provide a brief state of the art regarding the objetives, design and construction of our database, and, on the other, to offer a few examples of the possible approaches derived from the information contained in it that might be useful for the development of women´s history in an international level.
Women as Cultural Mediators: the Interwar Spanish Literature Across Borders (1914-1940)
Funded by the Galician Government (Secretaría Xeral de Universidades - Consellería de Cultura, Educación e Ordenación Universitaria), the research project “Catalogue of Spanish Literature Translations (1914-1940)”, currently under development, means to offer a bibliographic record and document collection of Spanish literary productions translated into English, French, Italian and Portuguese in the interwar period. Previous experiences (mainly derived from the construction of Valle-Inclán´s Digital Archive, managed by the Grupo de Investigación Valle-Inclán at the USC) account for the novelty value and importance of the “added information” this kind of databases can provide, mainly when regarding the networks of agents and institutions involved in the processes. The usefulness of these data is even more substantial when it comes to re-constructing the role and position occupied by women, in the case of writers and translators acting in what nowadays is known as the “Other Golden Age” of Spanish culture by the beginning of the 20th Century. In this regard, recent studies referred to the Spanish literary field of the time have projected Spanish women translators from the margins of historiography to the center of the feminist debate, offering new insights for the understanding of this period (such as information on specific trajectories of female translators). However, nowadays we are still lacking a complementary and panoramic view regarding the other end of the process: not just the importation of goods, but also their exportation abroad. In short: which literary products are translated from Spanish during the period 1914-1940? Who are their producers? Who are the agents and institutions responsible for that exportation process? And, most of all, what is the role women have played in it as producers of original texts or as mediators (translators, editors, publishers…)? Or, in other words, who act as counterparts of the Spanish female translators of the time? In this sense, this Catalogue is being specificly designed and implemented to account for the names of agents and organisms linked to Spanish literary field in the international frame, specially featuring the function and position of women in this process. Therefore, and bearing in mind the need for accurate and reliable tools for the study of translation as a cultural and economic market, the aims of this presentation are, on one hand, to provide a brief state of the art regarding the objetives, design and construction of our database, and, on the other, to offer a few examples of the possible approaches derived from the information contained in it that might be useful for the development of women´s history in an international level.